MIDI-controlled music synthesizers using waveform sampling technology are used extensively in the music and multimedia fields for their ability to create musical sounds that closely emulate the sound of acoustical music instruments. MIDI is a music encoding process which conforms to the Music Instrument Digital Interface standard published by the International MIDI Association. MIDI data represents music events such as the occurrence of a specific musical note, e.g., middle C, to be realized by a specific musical sound, e.g., piano, horn, drum, etc. The analog audio is realized by a music synthesizer responding to this MIDI data.
A major limitation of current MIDI music synthesizers is the lack of sufficient memory to store the entire sample of a wide range of an acoustic instrument's sounds. This inability to store many variations of a sound means that the music synthesizer would need, for example, a separate sample for the sound of 1 violin, another sample for the sound of 4 violins, yet another sample for the sound of 12 violins, and so on. Since each sample requires a great deal of memory, most synthesizers on the market offer a limited selection of variations.
This invention allows the synthesizer user to store only the sample of a single instrument, thus avoiding the additional memory requirements to store multiple samples, and to create the sound of a selected number of instruments, 20 violins, for example, without the need of additional memory.